Announced Collaborative Partnership Among U.S. and Canada Based Supply Chain Professional Organizations

The Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) and the Supply Chain Management Association (SCMA), the voice of Canada’s end-to-end supply chain profession, have announced a collaborative partnership that will bring expanded resources for companies looking to optimize their supply networks.

SCMA is Canada’s largest nonprofit supply chain association, representing and serving more than 7,000 professionals across the country, as well as the wider supply chain community. SCMA is a federation, with a national secretariat and 10 provincial/territorial Institutes.

ASCM represents the October 2018 rebranding of APICS, representing an ongoing transition towards a blended education and best practices delivery model for supporting both a particular business’s organizational-wide and individual supply chain process and skills development needs across multiple business process dimensions and training channels. The goals of ASCM included a broadened global alliance network, of which this announcement represents.

According to the announcement, This collaboration opportunity will enable distribution of each organization’s product offerings, development of joint training programs for Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 companies, participation and establishment of joint events, and combined thought leadership and publications.

This latest announcement foretells a closer relationship and collaboration in available training and skills development for both U.S. and Canadian based supply chain organizations and comes in the light of the newly negotiated United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a replacement trade agreement related to the former NAFTA, which awaits a ratification process among the three countries. Both NAFTA and soon, USMCA, establish integrated supply network process flows among the three trading regions. It makes sense to have collaborative skills development programs as-well.